Long suffering visitors may recall a series called Vintage Country Vinyl running from June to September 2016. It ground to a halt when I ran out of material. The good news is that it's back courtesy of me picking up a veritable slab of country for next to nothing in my local charity shop a few weeks ago.
And the even better news is that most of the artists have never featured here before.
One who has however, albeit briefly, is the wonderfully monikered Ferlin Husky.
He is of course most famous for the song Wings of a Dove from 1960 which featured last time round.
Nothing as famous on The Country Sounds of Ferlin Husky, a Music for Pleasure compilation which is featuring today.
Side one is pretty poor but side two starts of reasonably well with the two songs featured below. A country song about cheating - who would have thunk it!
Ferlin fact - he began his recording career using the name of Terry Preston a name he ended up giving to his seventh child.
I had planned to subject you to a new series today but I have now decided to save it for Sundays.
Instead you are getting a couple of tracks from the recently acquired ...And Then He Kissed Me by Rachel Sweet.
She shot to fame in 1978 as a 16 year old on the Stiff label with her version of Carla Thomas' B-A-B-Y. When I say shot to fame it got to number 35 in the UK singles charts. She was also part of the Life Stiffs Tour.
After two albums on Stiff she was signed by CBS with this being the first released in 1981. She only released one further album prior to returning to her studies.
She returned to music sporadically before becoming a successful writer and TV producer.
While she clearly had a great voice it would appear that CBS didn't really know how best to market her .The album has only 8 tracks but is a mixture of 60's pop and Maria McKee style ballads.
It would have been interesting to see in which direction her career would have gone had she hung around a little bit longer.
What I deserve and indeed what you deserve on a Friday is some music by the Americana artist Kelly Willis
I've featured her once before but not with anything from the only album of her's that I have namely 1999's What I Deserve on the Rykodisc label. It was her fourth studio album There have been another seven since.
Kelly and her husband and fellow musician Bruce Robison stay in Austin where they are seen as Alt Country royalty.
Bruce writes a few of the songs on the album (including the two below) where he appears with his brother Charlie and the likes of Chuck Prophet and Jon Dee Graham. What I Deserve is seen as a response to the treatment and the way she was marketed as an artist on her previous label MCA
Robbie Fulks does not appear on the album nor does the song Parallel Bars but I wasn't about to pass up an opportunity to share it with you.
Two for the price of one today as we feature the last two albums from the haul picked up in the British Heart Foundation shop in St Andrews for a pound a pop.
These two artists have appeared in this series before and given this is the second album from both they are getting a brief mention today for the sake of completeness.
Some of you may be familiar with the first artists a four piece combo from Liverpool called The Beatles. They featured before in this series with the White Album. If I was pushed and had to name my favourite Beatles song it would probably be A Day in the Life which I believe was the final track on Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
As the picture above suggests the album purchased, and on which it also features, was The Beatles 1967-1970 which Mrs CC informs me will be accompanying us on our Autumn holiday.
It is highly unlikely that The Unknown Soldier a 1980 album from Roy Harper on the Harvest label will be joining us
My favourite song by him won't be featuring today is it was on his previously featured HQ album.
If I'm honest I was struggling to feature anything from this album and have chosen this song solely on the basis that it also features Kate Bush. Dave Gilmour is on guitar.
Albums like this make you pretty grateful that the Punk revolution was in full swing around then.
(A characteristically gigantic temple of the LDS, this one on Brigham City)
George writes
Utah this week and I am going to do my very best to avoid making inane childish comments regarding a major organisation based in the 11th least densely populated state in the USA. And one reason is because Utah is absolutely fascinating regarding its natural phenomena. For example, the picture below is a snapshot of a forest, but amazingly that forest that appears to consist solely of one species of tree is actually one gigantic root system, giving rise to 47 000 trunks. It is 80 000 years old! So it predates any humans on the continent by 50 00 years.
(Pando aspen grove)
If that is not sufficiently interesting, Salt Lake City is home to a factory producing up to
20 000 rubber chickens every year. The same company also makes plastic dog crap and fart whistles.
First song. I love this video, and you will too
The second song will absolutely not be I Lost My Sugar in Salt Lake City by Julie London but I suspect my thrawn friend will make it available below my ramblings. It will also not be the Beach Boys song about Salt Lake City, it’s one of their “painting-by-numbers” tracks. It is by Evan P Donohue, from an album called Late Autumn Cassette, a collection of lo-fi ramshackle songs that manages to steer clear of being too clever or twee and too rubbish.
Did you know that the Great Salt Lake (ie the body of water near Salt Lake City) is a terminal lake ie no rivers flow out of it? As are the Caspian Sea,the Dead Sea and the Aral Sea (which has been all but killed by diverting its rivers to such an extent it now has only 10% of its 1960 area of 68 000 km2 ).
The people of Utah eat twice the amount of green Jell-o (that is common jelly to people in the UK) than the rest of the USA. And add grated carrot to it. Do they not have custard there?
And there’s more. For example, Bryce Canyon is “a hell of a place to lose a cow” according the person it is named after. And it’s not a canyon but a series of natural amphitheatres made by tall thin rocks (known as hoodoos).
Music. I found a track on Bandcamp called Spanish Fork, and given that it’s by a bloke from Provo, Utah, I am sure that the name of the city in Utah gave the song its name. Yours for $200. That is not a typo. The mighty Dave Donner and The Dynamites come to the rescue with a fine rock-y Americana track, Utah. The album is free, from Bandcamp. The vocal is endearingly slightly off-key, the music is well played, some nice songs, go on, splash out….(but not in an onanistic way).
And the first ever KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken) opened in Utah. There used to a KFC in Birmingham, England, called Karachi Fried Chicken; it did a great plate of veg samosa and chips.
So that’s Utah, And yet again I have seen more stunning, beautiful scenery, and I am coming to the conclusion that the USA is, visually, absolutely fascinating and fantastic. And I also discovered why members of the Church of Latter Day Saints are called mormons, but I think they don’t like it very much, but it did not seem offensive to me.
CC writes.
George, I'm afraid you will have to wait until the 1st of August for more Julie London.
By way of consolation here is Marty Robbins
I can vouch for the excellent samosas in Karachi Fried Chicken
The final of the four recently acquired compilations which are being recycled to charity given space issues is another one entitled Now Here This! - this time from October 2006.
Although some of the songs are alright I struggled for a couple to keep and share with you today.
To start of I've gone for one I already had I Drink by Mary Gauthier. The blurb says it was taken from the album Mercy Now but I have it on Drag Queens in Limousines.
In the early stages of our relationship I took Mrs CC to see Mary at The Arches but we had to leave as she found it too depressing. This song probably featured.
The other is an absolute belter and one I thought of saving for George's State of the Union series but i can't wait that long. Here is Lost in Boston by The Walkmen. A band I am vaguely aware of but one who I clearly have to find out more about and to get some of there music.The album from whence this came A Hundred Miles Off could probably be a good place to start.
When I decided on this series after featuring Cooper Blue this was the first album that sprung to mind.It was also a good opportunity to play it for the first time in ages.
From 1989, and on the Sub Pop label, Bleach was the debut album from Seattle grunge legends Nirvana.
It did not originally make much of an impression and I will admit that, like most folk, it did not cross my radar until it was re-released in 1992 on the back of the phenomenal success of Nevermind.
Amazingly it is the best selling album ever released on Sub Pop.
Kurt Cobain is credited on the album as Kurdt Kobain. Chris Novoselic and Jason Everman are on guitar with Chad Channing on drums as opposed to Dave Grohl.
More noisy stuff next Monday.
